Cooperation in the development team in practice

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Month: October 2016

Thinking about innovation and quality management may lead us to contradictions. Preparing to this article I have found number of empirical case studies that describe the relationship between quality management practices and innovation performance. One of such may be found here.

[…] several scholars reject the positive relationship between TQM and innovation for the reason that it possesses principles and practices that could hinder innovation. Slater and Narver (1998) and Wind and Mahajan (1997) agree that a customer focus philosophy could easily lead organizations to focus only on incremental improvements in their current products and service activities rather than trying to create novel solutions. Consequently, this leads to the development of uncompetitive “me-too” products rather than the development of real innovation. Customer focus, therefore, could build a “tyranny of the served market” in which managers see the world only through their current customers’ eyes. In this way, such firms could fail to explore customers’ latent needs.

Combining the two sections of the above analysis provides a plausible evidence and explanation on the positive and significant relationship between TQM practices and innovation performance because not only TQM itself would lead to innovation performance, but the quality performance resulting from TQM practices also contributes to innovation performance. […] This means that although quality management does not directly result in innovation, organizations that want to pursue a high innovation performance must have the capability to manage quality requirements of their products before hand, as asserted by Bolwijn and Kumpe (1990) and Ferdows and DeMeyer (1990). In other words, quality management is a prerequisite for innovation management, and, therefore, TQMis necessary although not sufficient for innovation

How it looks like from employee’s perspective? As an engineer I like discoveries, experiments and innovations. I realize that my interests may lead me to failures. In most cases unacceptable in a corporate environment. It is a difficult task to be innovative and reliable in the same time. It is difficult to be innovative inside the well-working factory. Where is the golden mean between standardization and innovations?

Why programming might be important for people working in the office? We can work efficiently, better… we surely hear this propaganda. In practice… how to start when we haven’t got a break to learn during the day? One may say: learn at home in your free time! Easy…

Do we like our job to be engaged in a such a way? What we will do after we’ll improve our skills? Do we have other tasks or responsibilities? Do we believe that we will be appreciated by our company? Many questions and doubts…

However, we may look at these questions in a different way. Let’s imagine…. we are working with the spreadsheets. We have to prepare a financial statement to our customers. Many financial statements… Collecting the data from number of databases, computing a financial balance…. and merging cells, coloring rows in a spreadsheet manually… Then we wake up with a well designed tool that is able to do all these things automatically ;)

Will you like your job more armed with this tool? How many your ideas were rejected due to the lack of time? How many time will be saved thanks to your engagement and programming skills?

Dream is only a dream but spreadsheet that colors rows and merges cells might be quite real ;) Click! Good point to start is googling for “how automatically …. in spreadsheet”. Your turn to learn programming :)